Thank you so much for creating the overlay.. I manually patched libXft & cairo many months ago, and became very accustomed to beautiful fonts. Then, quite recently, I went into shock after accidentally upgrading cairo with the regular portage version. I was so distracted by the ugliness, I could barely get any work done.

*
* ERROR: x11-libs/cairo-1.5.6 failed.
* Call stack:
* ebuild.sh, line 49: Called src_unpack
* environment, line 2669: Called epatch 'src_unpack'
* environment, line 1515: Called die
* The specific snippet of code:
* die "Failed Patch: ${patchname}!";
* The die message:
* Failed Patch: cairo-1.5.2-newspr.patch.bz2!
*
* If you need support, post the topmost build error, and the call stack if relevant.
* A complete build log is located at '/var/log/portage/x11-libs:cairo-1.5.6:20080216-020115.log'.
* The ebuild environment file is located at '/var/tmp/portage/x11-libs/cairo-1.5.6/temp/environment'.
* This ebuild is from an overlay: '/usr/local/layman/font-overlay/

Don't know why i'm gettin the error when aplying the patch. i think emerge is messing cairo from the overlay with the one from the gentoo portage
That doesn't exist:
/var/tmp/portage/x11-libs/cairo-1.5.6/temp/15271.patch
/var/tmp/portage/x11-libs/cairo-1.5.6/temp/cairo-1.5.2-newspr.patch.bz2-15271.out
neither /var/tmp/portage/x11-libs/

Gah, people still use that thing I posted? Well, it’s not quite working for 1.5.10 anymore, so I’ve modified it so it at least applies successfully: cairo-1.5.10-newspr.patch (download this). Compatibility with 1.5.10 entirely untested, use at your own risk.

If somebody’s studied the patch(set?) soya’s referring to, I’d like to know what it does, too.

Thanks! After reading the How To, I see no mention of the Boniek's font-overlay that I installed with Cairo. Does the overlay eliminate any of these steps? Or do I do the whole How To in addition to adding the overlay to Cairo?

The HOWTO was part of the xeffects overlay/project which is now dead. Boniek’s overlay supersedes those packages of that overlay which were relevant to subpixel rendering. Therefore, ignore the HOWTO steps until the section on ‘Changing font settings’ and proceed from there.

I don't think the .font.conf file is taking effect. I have a couple of questions:
1). when I make the .font.conf file, do I need to make it an executable file?
2). Where the doc saids "change rgb to subpixel order of your monitor)", I did not know what they were talking about so I made the line "<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" > <const>rgb</const> </edit>" exactly as it is.

UPDATE: I renamed my .fonts.conf file to .fonts.conf.bck so it wouldn't load. Afterwards I went into x server and loaded firefox and I don't see a change in the fonts. So I don't think the file is taking effect. Any ideas?

If somebody’s studied the patch(set?) soya’s referring to, I’d like to know what it does, too.

It's basically the same patch, but with some slight changes: it adds some documentation and has some code-cleanup. The most important change is that it adds an option ("lcdfilter") specifying the filtering-type: the values it may contain are "lcdnone", "lcddefault" (for David Turner's filter), "lcdlight" (David Turner's filter, but less agressive), and "lcdlegacy" (the default cairo filter). This option is set through fontconfig, which has to be patched with the patch from freedesktop #13566. Also please note that the option needs to be set for sub-pixel filtering to work; or, at least, not use the cairo default filter.

The most interesting thing about this whole story is that upstream seems to accept these patches; fontconfig-2.6 will contain the patch from freedesktop #13566, and the inclusion of the patch from freedesktop #10301 in cairo is being discussed.

For those interested I've modified the patch from freedesktop #10301 to apply to cairo-1.5.12; it can be found here. The fontconfig patch from freedesktop #13566 applies to fontconfig-2.5 just fine._________________Have you ever seen Geneva™, Monaco®, or New York®?
Geneva, Monaco, and New York are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., some registered in the U.S. and other countries.

Hmm, check if you have a symlink called /etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf pointing to /etc/fonts/conf.avail/50-user.conf. If not,

Code:

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d && sudo ln -s ../conf.avail/50-user.conf .

That’s the configuration file which includes ~/fonts.conf.

Ya, I check it and the link is correct. I don't think this file is getting loaded when I go into the X server enviroment or any other time. Reason being, to test to see if this file is getting loaded I went into the ../conf avail/ directory and renamed the 50-user.conf to 50-user.conf .bck so it wouldn't get loaded when I execute xinit. Well, after changeing the name I exited and went back into the X server environment and there was no change in fonts and no error messages. So I am think this file isn't getting loaded, which means the .fonts.conf won't get loaded ether. What should I do?

Are you still maintaining ebuilds? It would be wise to use ubuntu patches, since they are maintained and are in hardy by default.
I use their libXft, cairo-1.5.12, and fontconfig patches. They have option in fontconfig to disable lcdfilter on fly.